When the gods are shaken from the sky,
there's a scientific reason why.
There's no wish to replace them
and no-one's rushing in to win
the race to fill the empty space
— All About Eve, "Outshine The Sun"

Wednesday, 28 January 2015

So apparently Christianity isn't about ethics but rather “the explosive emergence of a new world”. 2000 years on, and the same old world is turning just as it always did. Isn't this argument starting to wear a bit thin?

Tuesday, 20 January 2015

I'd sum this one up as “likes mathematical models and demarcating science from metaphysics, dislikes Big Data and string theory”. On demarcating science and metaphysics he rightly says that Aristotle made no such distinction; but apparently fails to miss that the demarcation in modern times is demanded not by scientists, but by philosophers and theologians in order to protect their metaphysical territory from the incursion of awkward scientific facts.

Wednesday, 7 January 2015

This part (1 of 2) is pretty vacuous; just skips over the awkward parts by asserting (via a broken link) that the immateriality of intellect is already “shown”, and then recites various dogmatic statements from popes and theologians. Nothing resembling either evidence or argument.

Friday, 2 January 2015

Olson's primary choice of targets are those noted scholarly experts Dan Brown, Deepak Chopra, and Christopher Hitchens; no mention of anyone with much actual credibility (such as, say, recent academic publications) on the topic. Also commits the error of treating the gospels as a consistent unit, and ignoring the inconsistencies.

Estranged Notions

In Jan 2014 the Catholic blog/debate site "Strange Notions", which had expressly invited debate from atheists, banned many of its most prominent atheist commenters (including Andrew G., the owner of this blog) and deleted over a thousand of their comments. They also deleted all discussion of the incident.

For now, the posts labelled "Estranged Notions" are being offered as an alternative venue for discussion.

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